The High-Paid Life or Decade of CEOs
Annual compensation for CEOs is nearly always a thorny question. Not so ironically, every CEO wants to land on Forbes’ “Billionaire List,” but mention of annual salaries for public companies brings a corporate chorus of no comments or quick stage lefts – helicopter waiting depending on the benefits package.
Via WSJ (including the graphic): Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software maker Oracle Corp., topped the list of best-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, receiving $1.84 billion in compensation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of CEO pay. Coming in No. 2 on the compensation list was Barry Diller, who received roughly $1.14 billion from IAC/InterActive and Expedia.com, the online travel site IAC spun off in 2005, where he remains chairman. Following Mr. Diller [was] Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs with $749 million.
Over the past decade, Ellison has held strong in the face of Diller and Jobs, who’s comp is mostly in his stock and does not include Pixar/Disney transaction gains. Steve Jobs still remains the largest individual shareholder of Disney, which sums up what a superb brand strategist he is: Apple, then Pixar leading into Disney.
Forbes Dropping Billionaires with Few Overperformers
A year of steady losses. Of the 793 billionaires on Forbes’ 2009 Billionaire List, 656 lost money while 44 surprisingly added multi-millions in the downturn. Bill Gates returned to the top position ($40B net worth, down $18B) with Warren Buffett ($37B, down $25B) and Carlos Slim ($35B, down $25B) changing the first three seats. From a list of 1,125 billionaires recently, and $1.4T (that’s “trillion“) lost, we’ll look at a few of the past year’s success stories – and offer discussion and links to how those few overperformed. Read more >>
Billionaire Benefactors Give More Than You Think…
In 2008, many of our national billionaires gave much of their fortunes away, involuntarily. From Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas and Macau casino billionaire who lost $24 billion ($24B) to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and the Google guys, last year was a very difficult year to amass. Now who’s to say that losing “a few personal billion” when you still have “a few” is an innovation problem – it matters when these entrepreneurs pull back on progress and humanitarian giving to stem private losses.
Per Forbes, Warren Buffet lost $16.5B, Gates was down $12.3B and Google’s Larry Page lost more than half of his g-trove: $11.9B. Read more >>